Last updated 22 March 2021 ·
In order to make significant progress and move your business to the next level successfully, I’m a firm believer in the importance of building positive habits. I’ve noticed that amongst the thousands of CEO’s, Directors and business people I’ve worked with, they all have some defining characteristics. One of the big ones is that they value the importance of developing and maintaining positive habits. As you reach a certain stage in your business growth and begin to expand your teams, it’s important to adopt not only positive habits but productive habits that will save you time and increase effectiveness. These habits become vital to achieve stretch goals and really turbocharge your business performance.
One of the most important habits of all is…
Self-discipline
This is essentially the foundation habit, the one that drives all of the other habits and routines in your life. It will keep you on track towards achieving your goals and respect commitments you’ve made to yourself and others. It will help you on your road to success and provide the perseverance needed to succeed.
When I see someone whose sales are below forecast, they’ve often stopped doing the basic things they know they need to do. When I see someone whose fitness is not where they want it to be, it’s often because of a lack of self-discipline and consistency. If you’ve reached a plateau in business performance but your ambition is driving you to shake things up and get back on track to grow, you could introduce some new processes, but these require self-discipline to make them a success. In the book, The Science of Getting Rich, Wallace D Wattles talks about the importance of applying the willpower to keep doing the important tasks you really should be doing and don’t neglect these in favour of something more appealing in the moment.
The good news is self-discipline is a learned behaviour and through practice, over time you can implement self-discipline into your daily life. The easiest way I have found to build up the habit of self-discipline is by setting myself little tests. I’m talking about something small, almost insignificant. For example, it could be starting each day 10 minutes earlier and writing down your top 3 measurable goals to be achieved that day. It could be deciding to always take the stairs and not the lift. What you choose isn’t that important, as long as you pick something really small and stick to it.
What happens as you do this, and stick to it, is you then begin to do some very important things:
1. You begin to build trust with yourself
As you become more disciplined you will notice some significant benefits. You will start to have more self-control over your emotions and overall well being. You will strengthen your willpower and be able to say NO when something is going to take you off course from working towards your goals. You will become more aware of your actions and how these impact your health and give more consideration to your diet and exercise habits. Finally, you will become accustomed to taking action to achieve your goals.
Overall, as you apply self-discipline, you begin to take control of your life. You get more done which motivates you to push forward and go after what you really want. You build trust with yourself and get to the stage that when you say you’re going to do something, you do it. Over time, it becomes ingrained that you are the type of person who does what they say and maintains peak performance.
This habit is fundamental to success and will help you cultivate a sense of trust, high performance and excellence in your life and your business if applied throughout your teams. As you become confident in this area, you can increase the quantity and quality of new habits you commit to, so that you’re creating great work and life practices.
2. Linking habits with goals stimulates progression
A simple way to stay on track with this trust-building exercise is to make your habits have a strong connection to your desired outcome. Having your vision, objectives and goals all clearly established (these become almost like the promises of progress you will make) means that all you have to do is action them. Aligning your habits to facilitate the high performance required to achieve your goals… now that’s what we are all about at Reclaro! Our 1-3-5® performance system helps you do just that, find out here how milestones help you stick to your big goals.
When I began to build the habit of ‘exceptional personal organisation’ I found it easier to have self-discipline by first connecting to my number one outcome which is:
“Developing my personal organisation and using my time wisely will allow me to take more holidays.”
Sounds like good motivation, right? I take between 6 and 8 weeks a year off. I’m able to do this because I stick to my principle of being exceptionally well organised and 100% clear where my focus should be to achieve my goals. Simply put, my diary and my task lists are a thing of beauty! Discover how you can alter your mindset to reach your goals in another one of our blogs.
3. It enhances your mindset
When you connect your habits to your outcomes, you’ll soon begin to see the difference in performance that this new habit is going to help you achieve. Then, when you see it working, it motivates you to become more consistent and disciplined. And as you gain confidence in this approach, you’ll add new habits every few months (I add a new habit every quarter). Over time, with a more disciplined approach to creating new habits, you should see accelerated results, in your business and your personal life.
Several studies have revealed that your self-disciplined muscles strengthen over time and so the more you exercise your habit of self-discipline, the stronger it will become and the easier it will be to implement this habit in everyday life. Once you have a handle on self-discipline, there’ll be no stopping you! For more information on setting goals check out our blog offering 10 goals setting tips including Warren Buffett’s key to success
Reclaro offers a simple, OKR system based on the award-winning 1-3-5® methodology that allows strategic objectives to be recorded and effectively cascaded throughout the whole business increasing alignment, accountability and team performance to help you grow faster. The Team Overview Dashboard loads instantly and shows real-time performance data of all teams in the business, all in one single view. If you would like to find out more, please email pete@reclaro.com or book a demo today!
